May Stevens “Alice in the Garden”

RYAN LEE

This event has ended.

RYAN LEE presents Alice in the Garden, an exhibition of monumental paintings by the pioneering feminist artist May Stevens. A celebrated activist committed to the civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements, Stevens has used painting to combat social injustice and to revise women’s history throughout her seventy-year career. Between 1983 and 1990, she produced several large-scale paintings on unstretched canvas depicting Alice Dick Stevens, her elderly mother, during the last years of her life.

The five-panel painting Alice in the Garden (1988-89) is based on Stevens’s own photographs of Alice taken during visits to the nursing home in which she lived. The mural-like images confront the viewer with the massive figure of Alice-fleshy, fragile, and vulnerable. In her hands, Alice manipulates flowers-dandelions Stevens had playfully thrown at her during an afternoon visit. In the final painting of the cycle, Stevens, with her back to the viewer, pins a flower to her mother’s blouse. Stevens’s photos also serve as the source material for Fore River (1983) and the previously un-exhibited A Life (1984), both painted during Alice’s final years.